First Person

Things Diana Mosley Told Me

Philip Ayres

I WAS WORKING at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire for a few weeks in the early spring of 1990. I’d flown across alone from Virginia after staying with friends on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. Chatsworth is the home of the Dukes of Devonshire. The house is open to the public most days. I was there to carry out the first descriptive analysis of the eight-eenth-century library of Lord Burlington, the neo-Palladian architect earl. This work materialised as “Burlington’s Library at Chiswick”, published in 1992 by the leading journal in its field, Studies in Bibliography (University of Virginia; http://etext. virginia.edu/bsuva.sb),…